I visited York Ceramics Fair on Saturday with Andrea, the venue was in a great location in the centre of town, within easy walking distance of Coca. There was a mixture of established and newer artists, and quite a lot of visitors when I was there.
Colour
Adding colour has always been a bit of a problem for me, but I had begun to enjoy making glazes at Uclan, and had found some nice matt, satin and shiny glazes. However during my practice 2 module I had difficulty reproducing the colours obtained on test tiles, on my final pots. I have decided to double my efforts to sort this out, and am going to start with greys and blacks.
This brings me on to the work of Michelle Freemantle, left image above. Freeman had a range of work on display with a mixture of slip and glaze. Andrea pointed me in the direction of Yo Thom, and gave me a recipe for a similar slip/glaze combo. Paul Taylor, right image above, had pots with lovely black surfaces, he uses terra sigillata to get this effect. I have never tried this technique, but liked the effect on these pots.
Porcelain
During practice 2 the word porcelain was mentioned a couple of times. My slab building was so slow and laborious that I spent a lot of time trying to improve my skills with stoneware. I did however get a few books on porcelain from the library, but could find little use of slab building. Then I came across Bryan Hopkins, based in New York State. Hopkins uses a low-fire porcelain which he makes himself, based on soft-paste porcelain. In an article about his clay body, Hopkins (2014) recommends further reading, including Medici porcelain recipes. I am not sure whether this line of enquiry is achievable this year, but he makes fabulous slab-built porcelain pieces.
With this in the back of my mind I had a conversation with Anne Haworth who makes intricate flowers. Howarth uses Parian to mould her flowers, and adds paper clay to larger items, so unfortunately no soft-paste porcelain. Roger Cockram told Andrea and I how he has demonstrated throwing porcelain in India, and how he mixes up his own porcelain body. Again this was not the almost 50:50 clay to glass recipe that the Medici used, and the base recipe Bryan Hopkins hints at.
Expressive use of colour
Perhaps it is the precision of slab-building, or the constraints of my concept, that is drawing me even more to expressive use of glazes. The glaze application on the work of Tricia Thom, left image above, was delightful and free, and made me long for a big paint brush. I also liked the bottles by James Hake, top right above for similar reasons, big bold simple marks. I would enjoy doing that.
A final mention to Rachel Holian who explained how she makes each collection of pots unique by carving the base of a stirrer and impressing it in each individual piece in the set. What a great idea, providing personalisation for every customer.
Hopkins, B. (2014) ‘How low can you go?’, Ceramics monthly, 62(6), p. 58–.
Comments